RENEGADE

THE WORLD lay below him, its surface a ruin of cinders and ash. Below-ground, it seethed like a volcanic cauldron. The probes confirmed it: a nuclear wasteland.

“Another dead world,” Renegade murmured. A civilization had been here once; there were still traces of it which had not been burned beyond recognition. Then it had gone to dust – radioactive dust. The destruction was so great that in some places fires still burned underground to the roots of the soil…as they must have burned for a thousand years.

His friends shouldn’t have worried. It wouldn’t be possible to set foot here.

The creatures that had lived here must have destroyed themselves before they could reach a neighboring star, and kept their havoc at home; though it was impossible to tell, now. Whatever our own People’s faults, Renegade thought, our Credo and our Code have kept us together to reach the stars.  Honor and the Hunt. He wondered if anyone else had found the successful combination.

Ah. Well. Call in the probes and get tracking for home.

The survey ship was like the expedition ship in miniature. It had a small lab to analyze samples, robot probes and satellites which could be launched to scan a planet. It had everything except another Scout ship smaller than itself.

Renegade stayed in orbit until he had a chance to look at the latest series of live images: there seemed to be an anomalous moon here, very distant from its primary. He should track that down…

It wasn’t a moon.

“Not a natural satellite, no; an artificial one…no, bigger than that…a space station,” he muttered to himself. “Old…centuries old, pitted…but no serious radiation. Let’s have a look…maybe they left a trace of who they were.” Of themselves and their destruction.

He did the math and adjusted his trajectory to intersect the unknown’s.

The abandoned space station was huge, several times bigger than the Hunters’ expedition ship. Old and battered as it looked, the hull was still intact. Incredibly, he detected traces of atmosphere within.  Air pressure, too. He could explore it wearing only his facemask and light armor, with the air-exchange cylinder mounted on his back – for he was already planning to go inside.

It turned out to be rather tricky. The station was spherical with two large bays, one at the north and another at the south “poles.” These were closed, of course; nor was he capable of opening them from the outside with anything short of a laser cannon. And he felt reluctant to destroy anything.

He did find a number of entrance “funnels” along the equator like the more familiar docking tubes of the People’s space stations; and he could see what looked like a small airlock inside each one. One tube still held the remains of a ship, stillborn these many centuries.

The funnels were narrower than expected – they had been built by a different species, t’d’faal – so he had to back in and maneuver carefully to align the survey ship’s flexible pressure tube to the airlock.

He got it reconfigured and fastened down, donned his equipment including weapons, and cautiously made his way in.

The hatch door took some prying, and he didn’t relish having to unlock it again later; but he obeyed his long training and re-closed all the hatches, his own and the aliens’, behind him.

Inside, the space station was dark and dead. He shone the twin headlamps mounted on his mask around its cracks and crannies.

-- Old equipment, damaged equipment, a scene of disarray in here. Things thrown about, things lying on the floor to trip him. It shouldn’t be this messy if the outer hull bore no damage.

Where had he seen something like this before?

Then he remembered, and he froze.

The rescued Hunt ship.

The disorder left after a deadly firefight. The shiver that passed through him sent the light beams dancing.

“Stop it!” he snarled at himself. “These are the remains of some other trouble, that’s all. It doesn’t mean that they were here.”

Yet once he thought of it, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the bone-beasts lurked somewhere near.